A crowd of siblings gathers in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother. The surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering for the wake of their wayward, alcoholic brother, Liam, drowned in the sea after filling his pockets with stones. He is the third of the twelve Hegarty siblings to die. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him-something that happened in their grandmother's house in the winter of 1968. As prize-winning author Anne Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a "wonderfully elegant and unsparing" epic of an Irish family (Los Angeles Times)-a novel about love and disappointment, how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.